가격할인 대 기부와 연계된 가격할인이 소비자의 구매의도에 미치는 차별적 효과에 관한 연구

초록

Recently, not only overseas but also within domestic market, there are much discussion of ‘Ethical Consumption’. Naturally, the trend leads companies to consider corperate social responsibilities in their business activities. Cause-related marketing is an example of such endeavor where a firm’s sales is linked to donation to a charity or other public cause. Although cause-related marketing has been widely used in practice, research on its effectiveness on sales increase produced equivocal results. Especially when the effect of cause-related marketing is pitted against that of traditional price discount strategy, it is hard to be confident of its relative effectiveness. In fact, a study found that consumers prefer price discount to donation to a charity when the said amount is not too small. One way to boost the appeal of the donation strategy, we thought, is to combine it with price discount. In the current research, we pitted discount only strategy against discount with donation strategy and compared their impact on purchase intention. Specifically, we were interested to find out whether the discount with donation strategy would elicit higher purchase intention than the discount only strategy, even when it presents financially disadvantageous terms to consumers. The results revealed that consumers experienced higher purchase intention in the discount with donation condition than in the discount only condition despite the fact that the discount only condition was financially more beneficial to consumers. Such pattern of results was more pronounced, although not reaching statistically significant level, for those who were high in self-monitoring than for those who were low in self-monitoring. We also observed that consumers’information processing mode affected the effectiveness of discount with donation strategy. Discount with donation strategy was more effective when consumers were manipulated to process information affectively than deliberatively. Moreover, we found an interesting three-way interaction among promotion strategy, processing mode, and consumers’ level of moral identity. When consumers were high in their moral identity, consumers reported higher purchase intention in the financially disadvantageous discount with donation condition than in the discount only condition, regardless of information processing mode. When consumers were low in their moral identity, information processing mode made difference. Specifically, when manipulated to process information affectively, consumers reported higher purchase intention in the financially disadvantageous discount with donation condition than in the discount only condition. When manipulated to process information deliberatively, consumers reported the same level of purchase intention in the discount with donation condition and the discount only condition. The current research confirmed that cause-related marketing, even when it presents financially less beneficial terms than the traditional price discount strategy, could be fruitfully used to boost consumer purchase intention. It helps those in managerial position by delineating specific personality type and context under which the discount with donation strategy turns out more effective.

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